On paper, before a frame had been shot, people were talking about this thriller as an Oscar contender. John Hillcoat, director of The Proposition and The Road, directing a movie about corrupt cops. A passion project he'd been developing for years. And a cast positively brimming over with Oscar nominees and brilliant character actors. In the end, however, Triple 9 trips over its own lofty ambitions.

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The film starts with an audacious bank heist that ends in near disaster. The robbers escape with their lives and their target – but the woman who hired them, Russian-Israeli gangster Irina (Kate Winslet) refuses to pay them until they do one more job. Leader Mike (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is reluctant but sees no choice, and brings the situation to his crew – who, we have now learned, are mostly corrupt cops.

One of them, Gabe (Aaron Paul), semi-jokingly suggests killing another office to provoke a "999", US police code for an "officer down" alert that will draw all officers in the district to their downed colleague and leave the way clear for this second job. Marcus (Anthony Mackie) proposes his new partner (Casey Affleck) as their sacrificial lamb and so the set-up begins. But all, it won't surprise you to learn, does not go to plan.

The main problem with this film is that there's almost too much going on for the running time. There are intriguing allusions to Mike and Russel's (Norman Reedus of The Walking Dead) past, and Irina's role both locally and internationally, but nothing is spelled out.

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That's sometimes an advantage, allowing the audience to figure out bits of backstory without force-feeding, but in the end it leaves you a little frustrated, interested more in the stories glancingly mentioned than some of the business happening on screen.

Hillcoat, working for the first time in an urban environment, does manage the action well, with an opening bank heist that's up to the best standards of the genre. But the bigger job at the end of the film feels smaller than it should, and much of the business around that is wearingly familiar: the planning, the recces, the character who goes off the rails and almost blows the whole thing.

While the performances are as good as you'd expect from this crew – who are joined by Woody Harrelson, Gal Gadot, Teresa Palmer, Michael K Williams and Clifton Collins Jr – some of them are stuck with characters who are the definition of 'underdeveloped'. This might have worked more smoothly with a greater focus on just the thieves, or just the cops trying to figure out what's going on.

But by splitting its attentions between the cops, the robbers and the gangsters manipulating them, everything feels a little rushed. If this had been, say, a four-part HBO cop mini-series, it could have been a smash. As it is, it feels like just another police thriller with only flashes of something more.